 So today I'm gonna I want to share with you two growth strategies product led strategies one is customer acquisition and the second is more retention led growth you can apply these tactics to your product today to help you drive growth and a scalable and more effective growth within your organization. So I'm gonna cover these tactics and gonna touch each point there and basically the goal is to help you build this growth engine and apply your product into that. Before we dive in for those of you who don't know game site we have three main products one is the customer success platform that helps customer success teams mitigate churn risk and orchestrate customer journeys the second is product experience we're gonna you're gonna see some slides for some screenshots in this session as well but this product is the experience product allows you to drive adoption by using product analytics in-app engagement and email engagement all in one and the third product is a community product that allows you to grow through a community strategy. So this is kind of tiny matter with the reason you're trying to focus on product led growth even today is because it really helps you optimize those key business metrics that basically contributed the way mark the market analyzes your company so especially in volatile times you want to make sure that you're able to prioritize these product tactics so you can scale and build a more sustainable growth to survive these downturns and if we think about what led originally the product growth concept and strategy originally what we saw is every year we have more and more product competing for the same buyer so the landscape is becoming very very competitive and companies are looking for ways to optimize their customer acquisition which is steadily going up and one of the reason is obviously all everybody is bidding and trying to scale their customer acquisition and basically compete with each other. The third element that also worth mentioning is in the subscription model you want to make sure that you're able to retain these customers so today we're going to cover these two growth factors we're going to dive into the specific set of tactics you can apply to improve them because eventually retention led growth is somewhat overlooked in the market but you can also improve your product to address these challenges. Looking at the way the market evaluates companies you can see that product led growth companies are growing twice as fast compared to the traditional sauce and the reason is they're able to effectively and efficiently scale their go-to-market and leveraging their product to do so. So worth mentioning especially now and this is going to be the main drivers for companies to transition to product led growth. I'll ask you kind of a quick raise of hands how many of you are applying some type of product led growth motion today? Raise your hand? Not a lot. How many of you guys are coming from a B2B background? Alright B2C? Cool. Just FYI product led growth means that it applies to both industries both B2B and both B2C. We at Gainset are focusing obviously on sauce and B2B. Before we dive into the first tactic I want to cover just what is product led growth if you guys didn't hear about that term. This is basically taking your product and putting it on the forefront of the customer journey. It's leveraging the product as a vehicle to drive value to your customers. That's what it's all about and in these set of tactics I'm going to go over it's going to involve number one what type of features you want to prioritize to help you drive better growth. What type of data points you need to collect to tie these business metrics to your core feature and usage metrics and three what type of automation tactics you can apply to automate and scale your growth motion. So we start with customer acquisition. We call it acquisition led growth. Normally early stage companies they want to acquire customers as soon as possible and as scale as possible and when you launch and invest in trial experience what you're doing is essentially allowing users to experience value without being tied to human resources like pre-sales and sales heavily on those first mile of product. You can leverage free trial to just have the product take some of the heavy lifting in introducing your product and basically surface value. So the business KPI we are trying to optimize is customer acquisition cost. It's basically the amount of the company spends on acquiring new customers and this should be your north star as a lagging indicator when you're trying to optimize through a trial experience. So looking how can you optimize this trial experience this morning there was a fantastic session with Atlassian but we can see that although 65% of SAS introducing a trial not many of them are optimizing and here's a several tactics you can use to optimize your trial experience. You can see how Atlassian for example is really optimizing their sign up. You should treat that as an active campaigns always up and the goal is to reduce friction and you can see how they use social single sign on just to reduce friction and also how they message the value and some logo and outcome if you're going to try their product. One of the things one of the tactics you should build into your sign up flow is to basically ask the user to give you their sense of what type of role are they now in so you can learn about the different types of roles that are accessing these trials and second what are they objective because eventually you want to focus on the problem and you want to make sure that the objectives they sign up for are the right ones and you can optimize the experience based on who they are based on the role and based on the objective especially when you're going to we're going to see how we when we try to measure and we try to message these users these two data factors are key and what we also saw that when you introduce these into the sign up process which might sound counterintuitive it actually increases conversion increases the chances that they will activate the trial because we kind of created a set of expectation so this being used by Gainesville but also other customers of ours using these type of tactics to understand the customer journey before it even begins another great example from ConvertKit they also leverage the sign up process to further understand potentially where you're coming from you might be already an experienced person in using different tools and you want to know about that when you start analyzing and prioritizing your roadmap when you look at the data you want to ask yourself you know who gave me that feedback who is doing these usage patterns I want to know their background so it's a great way to say how they collect quickly a couple of things like are you using different tools before where is the maturity from the customer perspective as well as what is the target audience it gives them an indication of the size of account which as we know small account versus enterprise account will behave differently and will have different expectation another great example of a feature you might want to prioritize especially if you have a more broader B2B platform and this example is coming from software AG they've built templatized preconfigured onboarding experiences so you can as soon as you sign up you don't necessarily need to go to production and implement everything they're showing you the out of the possible we're seeing that also in mandate.com as soon as you come in there's pre-configured set of templates you can start launching and just experiencing the value of what the platform can provide to you without completely being onboarded to the platform within the trial one of the major element is to keep users engaged user will give you potentially three to seven business days to show them value sometimes if it's a very simple product might be just minutes most trials today I would say 40% are giving 30 days trial but what we saw in the data is you have a very small amount of days three to seven days to prove value to customers and make to their shortlist or potentially convert them what you want to do in these days is make sure that you're keeping them engaged because you're competing to their attention span right we are very busy especially in product management we always have things to do so any type of buyer from you if it's B2B or B2C they have a lot of destruction in the way you want to make sure that you create a personalized nurturing stream both outside the product using email and inside the product to guide them to value so that's one of the tactics to improve conversion to make sure you're continuously keeping them engaged and focusing on the window for opportunity that you have with them during the trial another tactics moving to automation that you can use is basically making sure that as soon as they onboard you can offer them a simple checklist of elements they need to go and experience in order to experience value with your product with your solution so one of the ways is to make sure that all the resources are available for them you can also make sure that they have the right assets videos walkthroughs it should be very targeted based on who they are you can really drive and accelerate time to value for them as they sign up so finishing this first strategy with core metrics you should track when you optimize trial number one is is the source of these sign ups you want to track organic and inorganic sources to make sure that you're able to identify which is the marketing channel that drives the best sign ups to your product as well as what type of aha moments feature usage within the trial that drove or help you understand that this this person actually experiences value of your product so mapping these aha moment as features tracking that customers actually attaching these features and experience values is the second one a third one is the user retention helps you understand how many days do you have before customers go dark and usually again it might be an hour it might be three days it might be seven days user retention and court analysis really helps you understand that and other two important KPIs are one is time to value classically measured by funnels just to understand how long does it take them to go and and experience each functionality and a new one which is product qualified leads and this is something that can augment your marketing qualified leads your sales qualified leads by just helping them adding to these leads intent data if someone signs up normally marketing will know their firmware graphics and and some of the top of top of funnel engagement what you can do is augment the data with some behavioral data from your product so you can create a product qualified leads and these are a very powerful way to just make sure that you're tracking because that factor is going to be the closest to predict what trials are actually going to convert so moving to the second product lead strategy which is retention lead strategy and how can you build and design product experiences that drive successful outcome so just few facts especially in the subscription recurrent business five percent increase of customer retention can lead to increase dramatic increase in revenue especially in this these times obviously in renewal and in recurring revenue the the the way you can optimize that is going to be covered in the next couple of slides but this is a major factor that you want to make sure that your product is assisting in that retention another important fact to remember as your company matures the majority of revenue comes from existing customers and it gets more costly to acquire new customers so if you think about set of features roadmap pricing and packaging you want to create more and more alignment around can we land customers quickly and can we expand eventually a customer lifetime value in a good SaaS business allows the customers to buy more as they grow but make the first interaction very simple so pricing and packaging your roadmap and your investment is going to keep out of that what is the business kpi we are trying to optimize and this is a major kpi that indicates how scalable are you in your go-to-market is net dollar retention is basically measuring how much the ARR grows over time including customer expansion and negative turn as well so if this number grows up and most product led companies you could see that net dollar retention is even above 120 percent it means they're able to scale in their customer acquisition but also they're able to sell more with less and the way they do it is basically through the product the product is driving that adoption increase of usage drive this revenue up and net dollar retention is valued by the market it will affect the valuation of your company so if you look at the the market today look for the net dollar retention this is a major kpi to see and this is what you want to optimize for as a lagging indicator to your product effort so i'm going to use a framework you should probably use as to optimize that and i call it the value path framework if i look at the spectrum of customers that you have today they move from early value to true value the more customers you're moving toward true value using deeper sticky features the more likely uh the likelihood is growing for them to actually renew so if you think about that you want to build an iterative process to analyze that and to create a scalable and personalized experiences to help push that them towards that outcome and you can really leverage your product and features to do so one of the best quotes i actually like from Elon Musk is when you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be better you can actually make better products you want to go back to these core features that you already released maybe six months ago maybe two years ago these are the core bread and butter of your product but now in these days your customers expect potentially more they may either want them to be to be simplified or richer in functionality and there's a lot of pressure when you're building a roadmap to build new things and deliver new things because this is what kind of expect from your roadmap but what you want to do is say hey i'm going to help you with key business kpi and for that i need a bucket and resources to address the core functionality because i want to optimize that customer journey towards outcome as opposed to lend new features that eventually might lead to complexity so you want to make sure that you're focusing on the value path as you prioritize in your roadmap so one of the key elements to do and it's a simple exercise is build this value path your user journey and we we basically slice that by the customer journey you have the first initial onboarding first 30 days might be a trial it might be 90 days first interaction with your product then you have initial value they're start using the basic functionality and then they go to true value the more advanced features the most scalable the admin features um and you want to make sure that you're mapping these uh stages of the customer journey and picking those three to five key features that if customers will use you know they're experiencing value so that should feed into your data analysis saying what am i trying to optimize where customers are getting stuck and first addressing that before you move on to the next stage and before you move on to releasing new features another experiment we've done with adobe for quite some time is analyzing how can you better influence uh users in that second and third stage and what we found is when you build the right segmentation of uh potential customers what we've done is actually we took two control groups one set of users that uh basically we didn't touch uh they experienced the product as is and the second group uh we built those nurturing campaigns enough campaigns to surface those value moments within the product and the outcome was pretty amazing to see how when you're messaging contextually um and just showing the next best action for your customers you're able to increase uh their awareness to these key features number one and number two once they use these features you know that they're going to be uh your product is going to be stickier so we saw that obviously the segmentation of usage historically is important we saw that you shouldn't show more than two to three steps in these walkthroughs you just user tends to want to search for the next action um and basically take it from there uh so also the frequency how often you try uh these are great insights that we inferred from this research uh for example we realize in b2b you want to try more than once companies users coming in that trying to do something suddenly they see a message they might ignore ignore it first so you want to make sure that you have a frequency set up to make sure that you nurture them and do it as contextual as possible um another very important thing is to learn from your customers um in many companies you use nps nps is a very aggregated metric right it's very hard to understand why is the nps is very positive or negative uh and especially when it comes to some feedback the customer just uh send you uh one way to address that is with a more customer effort score style of of surveys when you can be very specific uh and and score the value drivers those key features you're trying to optimize have your customers just uh score them and tell you what would they expect do they need more functionality or they actually need more usability um this is a very actionable type of input side by side with your analytics because if they use it it doesn't mean they're happy with it they might have to use it it's just the tool they chose now but comes renewal they might just swap to another tool because again it lacked functionality or visibility or it was just too complex so this type of surveys should feed into your data strategy as you're building your roadmap and that can feed into that uh as a powerful input another way to uh improve the growth retention as as features is constantly making sure that you're messaging what's coming what type of investment you're doing in your roadmap this is basically what gonna mean uh make your customers more successful and you want to make sure that they're aligned with you second is to provide them with aggregated outcome of your solution don't assume that your customer understand or um realizes the true value of your solution if you're not serving up that type of summary to them they need to understand what type of outcome uh have we have received with your solution and you should do it in a on a on a monthly basis and not try to do it just before renewal so these are good two tactics to follow just to make sure that you're constantly showing the investment and showing the outcome for your customers so before I wrap up uh the core metrics that you want to monitor when you optimize growth revenue retention which is again it's the most impactful one and sometimes the best one to start with when people think about product lay growth they normally go for to free trial or freemium but actually a mature business might benefit way more from retention led growth so a couple of key metrics that you want to monitor is one is the frequency we know the classic uh weekly or monthly active users um that you want to track also how many business days are they using your solution it's kind of showing how much of a habit is your solution if they use it on a daily basis that you know that any small tweak of usability gonna make a lot of impact on them as opposed to a person that comes once a month where you need to uh take care of other stock of elements it is not really worth for you to invest in very advanced features because it's not yet the habit the other two elements is the value drivers those core features that you map in that framework you want to track their progress the more customers are active the more new customers you have is this value driver the feature uses trending up the same way if not you realize that you're basically bringing more customers in but in the spectrum between early value the true value that's still very low so you want to double click into that and make sure that you're making that path more uh consumable for them and the last element as we said before is the user feedback because usage sometimes can be very very green but eventually your customer is struggling with these type of uh uh either they miss functionality or they actually feel that usability is a challenge so wrapping up uh when you want to drive product lay growth you can focus on these two uh uh growth metrics and today it's becoming a must have to just help your company scale uh you want to tie acquisition and retention with your core uh product metrics you want to prioritize your roadmap for outcome not necessarily new features uh and you want to create iterative process when you're learning from your customer input what should you focus next before you deliver new functionality so with that uh we're gonna we have actually a product lay growth uh book available in our booth uh first first come first serve so feel free to either download the soft copy or just grab the book from the booth with a lot more plg tactics and i'll be uh available for a virtual q and a so enough for the through the hopping platform thank you very much